


Tony Stark's Shelter for Homeless Assassins

by SilverMyfanwy



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Assassins & Hitmen, Avengers Family, Avengers Tower, Domestic Avengers, Implied/Referenced Sex, Multi, Poison, Poisoning, Therapy, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Weapons, a lot of weapons, so much assassin-y stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-04-24 02:10:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19163668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverMyfanwy/pseuds/SilverMyfanwy
Summary: "This is Clint. He's an ex-assassin.""Another one?"-Or, how Tony Stark found himself running what felt rather like an assassin rescue center.





	Tony Stark's Shelter for Homeless Assassins

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the below pic by thegirlinthebyakko:

"Tony.” Natasha walked into the workshop and gestured to the man with sandy-blond hair behind her. “This is Clint. He’s an ex-assassin.”

“Another one?” Tony looked up from his workbench in disbelief.

“Yeah. He used to work for SHIELD. Tried to kill me.” she said casually as she folded her arms and leaned against the doorframe.

“Every assassin from the last twenty years has tried to kill you at some point.” Tony deadpanned.

“Yeah, but Clint almost did. Is it okay if he moves in?”

Tony pursed his lips. “You just told me that _that_ man is a former assassin who managed to _nearly kill you_. And now you’re asking if he can move in.”

“Yep.”

Tony sighed. “Fine, but only if he’s staying in your rooms. If he wants his own, I want a reference from someone reputable who I don’t dislike. Plus, do I need to build a bodyguard in case he tries to kill me in my sleep?”

“Nah. You’ll be fine. Thanks Tony.”

They left as assassins do: silent and unnoticed.

“How do you do that?” Tony called after them. “Walk away silently? You’re not gonna turn around or answer me, are you? No, you aren’t. Fine. I’ll just put bells around your necks so you don’t give me a heart attack one day.”

Clint- because there is no way Nat would have stooped so low- purred. Tony threw back his head and cackled. “Oh, I like you! You can stay as long as you want.”

“Thanks Mr Stark!”

-

Tony was sitting glumly on the kitchen counter, a mug of coffee pressed close to his chest. Bruce walked over, sat down at the island and gave him a long, calculating look. “You don’t look so great.”

“That’s what you came up with? Really?”

Bruce ignored him. “What’s on your mind?”

“You said you weren’t a therapist.”

There was a pause.

“So, you gonna tell me?” Bruce asked expectantly.

“I feel like my house has turned into an assassin rescue center.” Tony said.

“What?”

“Look at them!” Tony gestured to the other residents of the Tower, who were gathered around the TV, watching a Mario Kart showdown between Sam and Wanda. “We’re getting more assassins by the day! They’ll need to start going up for adoption!”

Bruce counted something on his fingers. “There are quite a lot of assassins here.”

“Precisely!”

-

“There’s been an incident in the kitchen.” Jarvis told Tony one morning as he was doing paperwork.

“What sort of incident?” Tony happily put away the paperwork and got to his feet.

“Something’s happened to one of the pillars.”

Tony froze. “If Steve and Bucky have been-”

“Neither Captain Rogers nor Sergeant Rogers-Barnes were involved in the incident.” Jarvis reported.

“Then what happened?” Tony was already heading for the kitchen.

“Ms Maximoff has blasted it with her magic red stuff.”

“Is that the technical term for it?”

Jarvis was silent, then: “I believe so. Also, the pillar is now on fire but isn’t burning and Peter is trying to find a fire extinguisher.”

Tony swore and started running.

-

Hill was holding court from the nicest armchair in the common room. She had a list of things written on the back of one hand, a glass of wine in the other, and was giving the Tower’s residents their fortnightly update from SHIELD. “Someone’s made a suggestion for a new therapy group specifically for assassins that have either been pulled out or retired. You, you and you have to go. Fury’s orders.” she pointed to Clint, Bucky and Nat.

“I don’t work for Fury.” Bucky said flatly. “I never have. He can’t tell me what to do.”

“He says if you don’t go he’ll contact Homeland and tell them you’re an illegal immigrant.” Hill said.

Bucky scowled. “I hate him.”

“It’s optional for all the rest of you.” Hill waved her hand vaguely at the room. “But not Thor. He’s not allowed.”

They all nodded, understanding completely.

-

Clint, Bucky and Natasha were standing in the living room, dressed in full armour and arming themselves from the assortment of weapons on the coffee table.

“What is going on?” Tony demanded when he walked in, nearly dropping his mug of coffee at the sight of the knives and hand grenades.

“We’re going to that therapy group Fury’s forcing us to attend.” Bucky said.

“The Assassins Anonymous thing? Won’t it just be a room full of people who’ve tried to kill each other?”

Nat nodded. “Yep. That’s what this is for.” she held up a plastic bag filled with masks.

Iron Man masks.

Tony gaped at her in horror. “You wouldn’t.”

She shrugged somewhat gleefully. “It’s supposed to be anonymous.” she threw masks to Clint and Bucky, who caught them and prepared to put them on.

“I really hate you sometimes.” Tony said half-heartedly. “Are you going to be allowed to take all these weapons in?”

“We’d better.” Clint said darkly.

“Hill did make it clear that this is a _therapy_ group, not an opportunity to get revenge.” Wanda’s voice came from behind the sofa and Tony jumped.

“Wanda! Don’t do that! You nearly gave me a heart attack!” Tony yelled. “Are you going?”

Wanda nodded.

“Who’s overseeing the whole thing?”

Wanda shrugged.

“Dr Pia Zephets.” Bucky, Nat and Clint said in unison.

“I’m guessing you ran background checks on her with my software?”

They nodded.

“Well, good luck to her. Where’s it being held? Just so that I know for if I get a call from Hill begging for help.”

Clint looked at Tony skeptically. “You think you could beat a group of assassins in a fight?”

Tony laughed. “I don’t want to know the address so I could go and help! I want to know the address so I can get as far away as possible!”

The assassins nodded their approval and gave him the address.

-

Wanda, Clint, Natasha and Bucky returned to the Tower four hours later, only sporting three black eyes, a split lip and two broken fingers between them, which Tony saw as a great exercise of self-restraint on their part.

“Did anyone get killed?” he asked casually as they walked in.

“Almost.” Nat growled. “But they had paramedics on stand-by.”

Tony pulled a sad face. “Was that disappointing?”

“Yes. He was a pig.” she snarled.

“Was?”

“I removed his nose. He will be a pig no more.”

“And did you get kicked out of the group?”

“Yep.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

-

The pillar became subject to abuse fairly frequently after the incident with Wanda. Only a few days later it was full of throwing stars because Thor accidentally spooked Nat.

-

“Has anyone got an axe?” Steve called from the jacuzzi Tony had installed next to the sofa.

Don’t ask.

“Hang on.” Bucky opened a panel in the ceiling, took out an axe and handed it to Steve, who started doing something with a tin can.

“Why do you have an axe in the ceiling?” Pepper asked. “In the living room?”

“Comes in useful.” Bucky said casually.

Pepper turned to Tony. “Did you know he had an axe in the ceiling?”

Tony slowly shook his head. “I did not.”

“What other weaponry have you got hidden in the ceiling?” Pepper asked Bucky.

“Four knives in that wall, hammer in the ceiling, machete under that floorboard, spikes in the sofa, baseball bat behind there and a staff in that safe but Steve made me take the grenades out of the armchair.”

“You had grenades in the armchair?” Pepper was horrified.

“It was only two.” Bucky said.

“ _Only two_?” Pepper was aghast. “If that’s all the weapons in this room, how many are there in this building?”

“Those are just the ones Sergeant Barnes has hidden.” Jarvis reported. “Others have hidden more.”

Pepper facepalmed. “Oh great.”

About half an hour later, when Bucky and Steve had gone off with Wanda somewhere to do who knows what, a thought occurred to Tony. “I should probably find out how many weapons there are in this building.”

Pepper raised one eyebrow and looked at him dryly. “You think?”

-

Tony placed his hands on his hips and stared at the assortment of weaponry spread across the living room floor.

There were hammers, axes, knives, daggers, swords, rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenades, sticks of dynamite, baseball bats, machetes, throwing stars, staffs, maces, TASERs, nightsticks, cudgels, cleavers, arrows, boxes of explosives, shields, nun-chucks and barbed fish hooks.

Thor, Natasha, Steve, Bucky, Clint, Bruce, Pepper, Wanda, Sam and Rhodey were spread out around the edge of the sea of danger.

“Well,” Tony began, “that’s, uh…”

There was a cough from the doorway and they all turned to see Peter standing rather sheepishly with something behind his back. “JARVIS said you were, um, collecting all the dangerous stuff so it could be safer and things, so I uh…”

From behind his back he held out a small penknife. “Sorry I didn’t tell you about this sooner.” he held it out to Tony. “It can go in the pile.”

Tony looked from the penknife in Peter’s hand to the cleaver with a serrated edge that Natasha had just contributed, sitting next to a miscellaneous explosive and a hand gun. “You can keep the penknife, kid.”

-

Bucky found that the pillar was ideal for throwing knives at. Despite the pillar being concrete, he still somehow managed to embed the knives in it.

Tony didn’t ask how.

-

Natasha walked into the lab where Tony and Bruce were working with her arms around a large crate full of jars and bottles. “Boys!”

“What are they?” Bruce demanded.

Nat placed the crate on a bench and Tony and Bruce walked over to take a closer look. “Don’t open them.” Natasha warned.

“Why are they labelled in Russian?” Tony asked. “And why are some of them empty?”

“None of them are empty.” Natasha said swiftly. “They’re some old poisons I had lying around. I need you to get rid of them for me.”

Bruce picked up a jar with yellow vapour inside. “What kinds of poison are they and where did you get them?”

“Soviet poison labs.” Natasha said simply. “I’ve burnt the formulae. Don’t let anyone breathe in the fumes.” she turned on her heel and walked away.

Tony and Bruce stared at the crate in silence.

Tony swore. Bruce nodded his agreement.

“Why did I take in an ex-assassin?” Tony muttered under his breath.

“Actually, you took in four.” Bruce corrected.

“Don’t remind me.”

-

“Tony?” Clint stuck his head around the doorway of the workshop.

“How can I help you?”

Clint scratched his head and looked slightly sheepish. “Is it ok that we shot the pillar?”

“ _We_ shot the pillar, or _you_ shot the pillar and are trying to put some of the blame onto other people?”

“Mostly me, but Peter and Steve too!” Clint said quickly.

“What did you shoot it with?”

“Pistol.”

“You used _firearms_ in front of the _kid_?”

Everyone yelled at Clint for that.

Even Fury.

-

“I need help.” Peter dropped the open textbook on Tony’s workbench.

Tony looked up hopefully. “Is it maths?”

“Social studies.”

Tony’s face fell. “Try Sam. He’ll be able to help you better.”

“No, he won’t.” Peter tapped the textbook. “I need your help for this.”

“What jobs do members of your family have and are there recurring patterns, look at historical, geographical and economical factors linked to this.” Tony read out. “They make you do stupid stuff like this at school?”

“It’s not stupid, it’s fun.”

“It’s a waste of your intellectual capabilities. We should homeschool you instead.” Tony decided. “And how do you want me to help you with it? You need me to try and get some old records or something?”

“No, I need to know what your official job is.”

Tony stared at Peter blankly. “What?”

“What’s your job? Like, the one you put on your tax forms.”

“I’ve never done my tax forms.” Tony said flatly.

“ _What_?” Peter shrieked. “You’ve never paid taxes?”

“Of course I’ve paid taxes, I pay all my taxes! I just get someone else to fill out the forms.”

“Good. Can you ring them and find out what they put on the form please?”

“Jarvis, what do you put as my occupation on tax forms?”

“Owner of SI, genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.”

“That’s not an occupation.”

“Businessman.”

“What are you going to do now?” Tony asked Peter.

“I’m going to go and find out everyone else’s jobs.”

-

Later on in the afternoon, Tony walked into the kitchen to find Peter sitting at the island with a calculator and a page of notes. “You finishing your project?”

Peter looked up at Tony, horrified. “46% of this family have worked in assassination.”

Tony froze. “Don’t put that on your report or the CIA’ll show up. Change it to something else, like bankers. No one’ll know you changed it.”

Peter nodded and began writing a new set of results down.

-

The pillar’s main use was as a target, so it really was a good thing that it wasn’t necessary for structural stability.

Pictures of Trump would be pinned to it and brutally attacked. There was a whiteboard next to it explaining why they were mad at him that particular day. If a rare day passed when he hadn’t done anything awful, they’d just draw a trans pride flag on the whiteboard and slash a picture to shreds.

-

There was a ridiculous amount of food on the table.

Like, _ridiculous._

There was enough food to feed all the Avengers for a day and a night, which was saying something.

Thor was standing next to the table wearing an apron that said something rather lewd and Clint was next to him, apparently teaching him what foods were and weren’t poisonous to humans, under which conditions and why.

Tony thought it best to turn around and go back to his lab.

-

Ex-assassins, it seemed, did not partake in normal aspects of life.

Particularly how to deal with someone choking.

Peter, who was over for the weekend and eating toast while chatting to Tony and Bucky, coughed slightly on a mouthful. Bucky jumped over the counter, reached down Peter’s throat and extracted the toast.

Peter and Tony, who were both in utter shock, stared at him.

“What the-” Tony swore at Bucky as he calmly washed his hands at the sink.

“Don’t let Steve catch you talking like that or he’ll wash your mouth out with soap and drag you to mass.” Bucky reprimanded. “Peter was choking, I saved him. Simple.”

Peter and Tony looked at each other and an unspoken agreement to just try and carry on like nothing had happened passed between them.

-

“They’ve broken the pillar.” Rhodey announced.

Tony continued working.

“Why are you not surprised?”

“I am surprised.” Tony said casually. “But only about how long it’s taken them to break it. How did they manage it?”

“Dynamite.”

“Ah.”

Rhodey watched Tony work in silence for a few minutes. “The pillar wasn’t stopping the roof from caving in, was it?”

“Shouldn’t have been.”

There was an ominous rumbling noise above them and Tony and Rhodey stared at each other.

“OK, maybe it was. JARVIS!”

-

Assassins, it turned out, really did not like charity balls.

“I know the fake smiling can be a bit much but you’ll get used to-”

“It’s not the smiling.” Bucky cut Tony off.

Tony froze. “No?”

“It’s Nat.”

Tony frowned. “What?”

Bucky shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I feel like I should be going to kill someone with her coz she’s here.”

“Is that something you used to do?”

Bucky nodded. “One of us would do the seducing, the other the killing.”

“And then what would you do?”

“Then we’d find a bedroom and- well, y’know.” Bucky said simply, then made some rather lewd hand gestures.

Tony stared at Bucky with a mixture of horror and shock. “That was way too much information.”

“Maybe someone’s here to get me.” Bucky said ominously.

Wanda walked over. “Have you seen Clint?”

Natasha joined them. “He’s on the roof. He got a copy of the guest list and he’s background checking everyone.”

Bucky and Wanda visibly relaxed.

Tony had an idea. “Would you four rather be the security at the next one of these we have to go to?”

They nodded.

“I’ll sort something out.” Tony promised, then flagged down a waiter for a drink.

-

It was Friday evening. Tony was in his workshop, tinkering with a car, and Steve walked in looking despondent.

“Everything alright?” Tony asked.

“They’re debating who shot Kennedy.” Steve said.

Tony stared at him disbelievingly.

“I know.” Steve sighed. “Bucky thinks he did it, but Clint disagrees and thinks it’s some guy named Max. Nat’s officiating because apparently she knows who actually killed him. Can I spend the night here? If I go back they’ll make me pick a side.”

“I’ll get you a blanket.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr! @silvermyfanwy


End file.
